Recently, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called the requirement for fishermen to pay an estimated $710 per day for catch monitoring “the most perfect example of an unfunded mandate,” going on to call the policy “ridiculous” and “outrageous.”

As a fisherman with close to 50 years’ experience in the fishery, I could not agree more, but think your readers and editors need more context to understand the fishermen’s anger.

Philosophically, we are opposed to this idea because other industries do not pay for their monitoring.

The airlines do not pay for the Transportation Security Administration, agribusiness does not pay for meat inspection, and pharmaceutical companies do not pay for the Food and Drug Administration, to name a few. These are considered functions of government, and so is catch monitoring.

The second reason is economic: The cost of monitoring exceeds what small vessels, such as mine, make in a day. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service has been informed of this fact by their own economists.

NOAA has also been told in a letter, signed by the entire congressional delegation of New England, to find the money in their budget, but has refused.

NOAA Fisheries is ordering fishermen to sign payment contracts with the for-profit observer companies, that the fishermen have no say in negotiating, or be locked out of the fishery by NOAA Fisheries. I am sure labor law experts would be interested in examining this situation.

Finally, there is the issue of how this program became so expensive. The program was designed by NOAA under an administrator who now owns the largest of these for-profit companies.

I believe the Inspector General of the Department of Commerce should investigate the relationship between all current and past NOAA officials and these companies.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, something is rotten in Denmark … and it is not the fish!

David Goethel

Hampton, N.H.

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